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I doubt even if I were scraping the barrel I’d be able to find anything positive to say about Spartacus: Blood and Sand. The pilot episode is a poorly written, directed and acted mess. It’s predictable and disgusting, with a frankly gross amount of swearing, nudity and blood. I was honestly counting down the minutes until it ended. After the first hour I was left wondering if it was for real...I mean, I’d just about be able to understand if it was a joke: it felt like one.
Because I’ve absolutely nothing nice to say about Spartacus, I’ll just list everything that it does wrong. In the same way that the show itself does, let’s start with nudity. Used sparsely, nudity can be very effective; it can entice or show vulnerability. However, Spartacus uses naked bodies every couple of minutes or so for seemingly no reason whatsoever. Every sex scene is basically porn; men appear to literally never wear shirts and in almost every shot there’s some random woman with her boobs out in the background.
Then there’s the blood. Oh, so much blood. It’s on people’s faces, gushing from their wounds, or just flying around with no obvious source. The show seems to aim to be like the film 300 - just with even more blood. And because it sprays across the screen in laughable quantities and has an overly stylised appearance (à la Sweeney Todd), the blood has barely any effect on the viewer. It’s just all a bit silly, never more so than when the screen becomes fully red from blood at the climax of the first episode’s gladiatorial fight scene.
Another way it mimics 300 is its set design and effects. The landscapes are entirely fake and green-screened (which is odd considering it’s filmed in New Zealand). This means nothing feels even a little believable, which leads to probably one of my biggest issues - there’s far too much slow motion. It’s something that only really works when used rarely: Spartacus uses it all the time – in fight scenes, in sex scenes, in dialogue and in scene changes. If you’ve ever wondered when slo-mo stops being cool and starts simply being annoying, then just watch this.
The acting in Spartacus is just another one of its terrible aspects. Not a single performance is convincing and the characters achieve zero sense of individuality. They spend far too much time hurling swear words at each other or having a punch-up. However no aspect of the show is as awful as the script; the failings can be tracked back to just how badly written it is. The plot doesn’t really progress as such, and there isn’t a single interesting narrative moment; the fact that it’s full of historical inaccuracies goes without saying. Within merely minutes I’d lost track of the thread and lost the will to ever find it again. The dialogue is predictable and it just feels like we’ve seen this all before.
So to sum up: watching Spartacus is the equivalent of seeing some guy swear at another guy, proceed to bloodily kill him in slow motion, then a slow motion scene change to a woman exposing herself; softcore porn ensues. That’s about it.
Catch Spartacus on Tuesday nights at 10pm on Bravo
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